Hi 👋

Thank you for being here, it genuinely means a lot. I’ll share more about my background and how I got here properly soon, but this felt like a good place to start.

I always wanted to build something of my own.

Not in a dramatic, “quit everything and go all in” way. I needed to pay the bills and support myself so that wasn't an option.

So Tenth Muse started like that.

Alongside a full-time job, long days, and eventually a baby. It wasn’t the perfect time, and I didn’t have huge amounts of space for it. But I started anyway, fitting it into evenings, weekends, small pockets of time.

And within our second year we hit six figures.

I think about that a lot now, because it didn’t happen in the way most people talk about building.

The biggest difference was time. Or more specifically, the lack of it.

When you don’t have much time, you don’t get to overcomplicate things. You don’t get to try everything. You don’t get to build big, messy systems that only work if you’re constantly feeding them.

I think there’s a version of building a business that looks good from the outside and then there’s the version that actually holds up.

They’re not always the same.

For me, it meant keeping things lean, sometimes probably too lean. Figuring things out as I went. Not having a big team. Not having loads of time to fix things later, so trying to set things up properly early on, even if it took a bit longer upfront.

Less “scale fast”, more “make this work properly first”.

I’m sharing this because I don’t see that side talked about that much.

There’s a lot about growth, but not as much about how you build when your life is already full.

When you can’t just throw more time at something and when you need things to be simple enough to run on a normal day.

That’s really what I care about now and why I have set up this newsletter. To help other Founders with how to take something from an idea to something real, without it taking over everything else.

Anyway, this is a bit of an intro, and probably the start of me sharing more of this side of things.

Not perfectly, just as I go.

Subscribe to stay tuned! Sophie